You are here

Climate Change

formerly “Climate Science” this has been updated in recognition of the fact that ALL of our articles, events, etc. involve climate sciience. ”Climate change” is intended to suggest changing elements of the climate: e.g., shifts in global oceanic and atmospheric circulation and ensuing changes to temperature, precipitation, groundwater levels, saltwater intrusion.

Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University explains how the value of information regarding projections of climate sensitivity depends on:

1. what the decisions are to be made about and for whom, 2. the character of the decision space (states of nature, irreversibility, persistence, etc.), 3. decisions based on the range of “states of nature” and “their distributions”, 4. decision makers prior assumptions about those distributions, 5. decision makers’ attitudes (averstion) towards risk, 6. timing of the decision.

He sets the stage for the day’s conversations by reviewing the just released IPCC 5th Assessment Report, some of its findings, and the unique language that the IPCC uses to describe uncertainty in climate sensitivity, the key parameter that concerns economists and climate scientists.

Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences in the United Kingdom, discusses the basics of climate modeling and a history of how models have grown in sophistication and the questions that remain today. Dr. Lunt describes his research interests as broad, with a special focus on icesheet-climate interactions and comparison of the paleo record with climate models.

Understanding the ecological mechanisms governing the biogeogoraphy of organisms is essential to predict how climate change will alter ecosystems and their functioning. Factors affecting the patterns of aboveground plant and animal communities across landscapes have…

The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) — responsible for most of the precipitation on Earth — is defined by a pronounced maximum rainfall occurring 5◦ north of the equator over most ocean basins. The existence of an ITCZ directly derives from large…

Frogs that eat holiday lights, birds that eat plastic, and beetles attempting to mate with beer bottles are all examples of organisms that have fallen victim to what biologists call “evolutionary traps.” Whereas natural selection typically produces organisms that behave in ways to maximize their fitness, resulting in more offspring passing their genes onto the next generation, human actions sometimes short-circuit the process…

Carbon dioxide transfer from inland waters to the atmosphere is a significant component of the global carbon cycle. Global estimates of CO2 transfer have been hampered, however, by a lack of a framework for estimating the inland water surface area and gas transfer velocity and the absence of a global CO2 database. Here we report regional variations in global inland water surface area, dissolved CO2 and gas transfer velocity.

Mary Louise Timmermans introduces Peter Rhines who shares his latest field observations from the subpolar Atlantic and what they offer climate modelers. Peter’s talk covers introductory concepts related to Arctic climate and how it influences atmospheric and oceanic circulation as well as more technical information on ocean circulation dynamics which exert tong controls yet are under-represented in IPCC-class coupled climate models.